I'm getting quite frustrated by this because I can't work out exactly what's causing this - whenever I save a document from illustrator to import as a comp to after effects, I usually convert the layers to shapes so I can animate them. For some reason, since the latest update, whenever I attempt to convert to a shape layer, inside the shape it will create and unnecessary group with a path the same size as the artboard as the illustrator document it came from, and also a merge path modifier. There's no reason for those to be there and it makes layer selection incredibly frustrating. Because of this, I need to go through every single shape and delete all of these groups. If it were one or two shapes it wouldn't matter - but this is all of them.

Actually, I did mean 13.6.1 but even after the update to 13.7 I'm still having the same issue. I'm thinking maybe there is some kind of issue related to illustrator and the paths - but honestly I'm not sure what it could be. I've removed all their groupings, there are no clipping masks or transparencies or effects. They're simply paths, so I have no idea why it creates a path the same size as the artboard when I convert it to a shape in after effects. As a static vector layer, they retain the layer sizes.

this is an annoying bug that took me forever to figure out, but after a few years I finally realized that if you have ANY objects in your AI file that use transparency or gradients, you will end up with the "group 1, merge paths" addition. Sadly AE cannot seamlessly transfer opacity or gradation from AI. In fact, AE does not have the same gradient capabilities as AI, so that one is out of the question. You might also want to convert any Pantone colors to regular rgb or hex values before opening in AE. I don't remember if pantone colors cause issues but AE doesn't have Pantone color tables anyway, so better to convert them in the original document.